“You can’t run no hundred yards,” said Michael Wilson, “anywhere.”
Somewhere in the afternoon they topped out finally and started coasting downhill toward the city of Denver. East eyed the silver Colorado State Trooper cars, Chargers and Expeditions and the long, flat Fords. They scattered everywhere on the downhill, working the speeders like sharks tracking prey. Once a trooper dogged their back bumper for miles. “I’m going fifty-five, motherfucker,” Michael Wilson protested. “Fifty-five minus two.” The trooper hit the lights, jumped out from behind them, and bit on a Jeep. Everyone started breathing again.
Ty’s gun, thought East. Ty’s gun, Ty’s gun, Ty’s gun.
The van knifed past the city, the buildings low and shiny and suddenly too colorful below the cold blue sky long-grained with clouds. As they merged from one highway onto another, East turned back to look. The mountains stood in line behind them, still close but collapsed now, pressed together. No hint of what they were, what they held. Just another line, a little brighter and sharper than the brown line of home.
And they could see what was coming. Flatland, an endless sea of it.
“Someone else drive,” said Michael Wilson. “I’m tired of seeing shit.”
Walter took the wheel. Michael reclined in the shotgun seat, rubbing his face with a pair of fingers. East sat back on the middle bench and watched him fuss and prod. “You learned that where? Tokyo Spa?”
“East, baby, no,” Michael said. “I learned this from your mother.”
East smiled and watched the road, the eastbound trucks. After a while he shut his eyes too. Let himself fall off to sleep.
Except for the chirping. He peeked around at Ty. Ty did not look back. The muscles in his fingers twitched around the gray plastic tablet of his game. Something with aliens and bombs. Ty could lie around playing forever.
“Don’t that thing run out of batteries?” East protested at last.
Ty’s eyes zeroed in. “Run out all the time,” he murmured. “But I don’t.”
“You go see your mother?”
“No,” snorted Ty. “Did you?”
“Yes. I took her some money,” said East. “Night before we left.”
“Well,” said Ty, more quietly, “ain’t you nice.”
East said, matching Ty’s quiet, “Somebody said you might have a gun on you.”
His brother’s eyes ticked up and down, following something minuscule along an inch-long track. Then at last the game flashed in his face, and he relaxed.
“That’s my business.”
“You know you got no need to be holding,” East pressed. “Fin said stay clean till we get the guns.”
“Fin said.”
“I ain’t trying to take it. But you should let me know.”
Ty dialed madly with his thumbs, and his game trilled. “Shit be crazy, ain’t it?” he murmured.
Shit be crazy. Between the two of them, it was a refrain, an old one. It meant nothing and everything at the same time, unreadable and obvious. Like a glance, like a wave in the street. It stood in lieu of ever being in their mother’s house at the same time or knowing where the other slept. It stood in lieu of East having the slightest control over his little brother, or of his owning up to losing Ty. For Ty belonged to nobody now, an unknowable child, indolent as bees in autumn, until he rose up and moved in a spasm of energy and force.
Where Ty had come from, where Ty was now: these things East knew. What had made Ty what he’d become: that was the unseeable, the midair coil the whip made between handle and crack. That was anybody’s guess.
Big brother taking the little, they called it babysitting. But it was not that. Nothing like it.
Deep in his game, Ty smiled. His thumbs drummed out a sprint. Then he relaxed his gaze. “You made me lose,” he said.
7
East liked driving here — the flat, unruffled fields with no one in sight, blind stubble mown down into splinters, maybe a tractor, maybe an irrigation rig like a long line of silver stitches across the fabric of earth. The flatness. There was more in the flatness than he’d expected. The van’s shadow lay long, and the fields traded colors. The boys slept in intervals or complained. Riding in a car for more than a few hours, he thought, was like suspended animation — somewhere under the layers of frost, your heart beat. To the left, a thunderstorm hovered, prowling its own road.
They crossed under the front end of a line of storms, everything wet and alight in the slanting sun, and then they were out the other side but in the cloud’s dark. The tank was low again, and East angled in for gas and stepped out. Little park of pumps under long white storm shelters and a steak-and-eggs place with a shop under a bright yellow plastic roof. Pickup trucks moved in the low, narrow roads on either side and climbed onto the highway, high and chromed or capped and rattling or stuffed with tools or crops or white bags of dirt. Men and women in their windows looked at him, eyed him with interest.
“You boys the only niggers they ever seen in real life,” drawled Michael Wilson, “except Kobe.”
“That was Colorado,” said Walter. “We’re in Nebraska now.”
“Don’t tell me Kobe ain’t got some girls in Nebraska too.”
East waited while Michael Wilson paid. Then he filled the tank and parked the van. Ty was sleeping, a reptile: East locked the doors around him and went in to sit in a bathroom stall. The farther east they got, the dirtier the toilets. Like every toilet in the country had been cleaned the moment they left LA and none of them since.
East shook his head. Sleepless. The person in the next stall wore his music through headphones and moaned along under his breath. Straining, suffering, only one word audible, at the end of the lines: You. You. He smelled like rotten eggs, like rot inside, and then he was gone. East grimaced and stopped breathing. Trying to press his gut out like a toothpaste tube. His thinking was frayed, sleepless: he had to think straight. They were close to getting there. He had to make sure everyone slept tonight. And walked around, cleaned out their heads.
He zipped up and left, no lighter.
Outside, the storm was about to catch them. It rose flat-faced, a gray curtain, sweeping loose trash along. Walter had taken the wheel and was idling at the curb. East swung himself up and in on the shotgun side. Then he noticed the smell. Like the mall, the kiosks where Arab girls tried to spray you: Sample, sample? You like it. That fruit-sweet smell.
The second thing he noticed was the shoe. A golden shoe, like a wedge of foil, with a girl’s foot in it. It hovered brightly between the front seats.
The rest of the girl sat in the center of the van. Michael Wilson was beside her, all sideways and charming. In the back, Ty sat straight in his seat like an exclamation point. For once aroused but not sure what to do. Walter, steering the van away, was trying not to even look.
She was white. Sixteen, seventeen, red hair in curls and loop-the-loops. Bravely she looked at East, or curiously, as if she were nervous. But she was used to courage seeing her through.
No one else was saying anything, so East said it: “Girl, who the fuck are you?”
Michael Wilson made a crackling with his tongue. “E, this is Maggie. She just might ride for a while, over to Omaha. We can drop her off at the airport.”
East said, “No. She ain’t.”
Michael let out a grin and a sigh.
“E,” he began. “This girl needs help. She was just lost up in this rest stop.” He had a hand snaked across the girl’s belt, which, East saw, matched the golden shoes. “Wasn’t nobody going her way. But we are going her way. Right?”